


Echo Through the Empty Streets

by Dark_Ruby_Regalia



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Gen, Mystery, Venetian Blinds in a Bar Cliché, noir, running from danger
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:48:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25101937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dark_Ruby_Regalia/pseuds/Dark_Ruby_Regalia
Summary: Prompto is running from something. Nyx gives him shelter.A moment captured in Noir aesthetic. Nothing is resolved.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	Echo Through the Empty Streets

It was late. Dark. An unknown part of the city, aside from its rough reputation, but at the moment — in his fear and confusion — nowhere could possibly feel familiar, let alone safe. Prompto would take the rough along with the rest, if it meant he could find some respite here in the tangle of laneways and vacant streets that hissed steam and splashed grease and funneled him frantically onward through its crumbling mortar maze. 

He glanced over his shoulder, wondered why he felt so out of breath despite the running he did every morning for fun.  _ For fun. _ Maybe the difference was he’d never run for his life before; never had the adrenaline scouring his veins with panic a vice around his chest, each breath constricted and inadequate. He scrambled through a skid around a corner to slip down an opportune narrow alley, hoping to lose the footsteps that echoed in the street behind him and pounded ever louder in his mind; hoping he’d pulled ahead  _ just enough _ that nobody would see him take this turn now. 

He twisted again to look behind him, all but stumbling over his own feet, his inevitable fall apprehended by two strong arms and a button—up chest that was warm and solid beneath his sweat—damp cheek, though so unexpected Prompto let out a startled shriek and flailed to disentangle himself from his confusion and the embrace both. 

“Hey, kid, it’s okay, settle down.” The stranger let Prompto find his feet again before releasing him. His gaze was an appraisal, thorough and probing, which drew a crease of concern across his face. “You need help?”

Prompto gathered his breath in great heaves. His voice still came out weak despite the exaggerated effort to form words. “I need… to hide.”

“Well, a golden thing like you sure stands out a mile.” 

Prompto turned again to check the street, but it was hollow and black, a void of absence. Just him and this man, but for how much longer? He listened for footfall; all he heard was the hammer of his own heart.

The stranger narrowed his eyes and looked down the alleyway over Prompto’s shoulder. There was nothing there, yet, but something in Prompto’s eyes — the wild flash of true fear — told him to take this serious.

“Get into the bar.” He stepped from the curbside to the door of a small saloon, opening it on groaning hinges and pushing Prompto through. A bell tipped over itself, announcing their entry to an empty room. “I’m just closing up. We’re alone.”

Prompto peeked furtively through the windows to the damp alleyway beyond, lit in alternating pinks and blues by a flickering neon sign, letters contorting in bends of glass through the air, suspended in the window itself. The stranger — the barkeep — flicked it off a the wall, then dropped some dusty venetian blinds — seldom used, by the look — to give cover. They clattered to the windowsill, a chorus of rattling slats. He twisted a rod to crack them every so slightly open, an angle that would let them see out, but nobody else see in. Prompto shuddered. 

He ran fingers through his hair, wondering what everything had come to, to choose being shut in a bar with a solitary stranger over the comparative freedom of the streets. Bad part of town or not, at least there he could have kept running. Whether by exhaustion or relief, he didn’t know, but he sighed and felt air come more easily to his aching lungs.

“One more load to take out,” the stranger said, disappearing behind a curtain in the back of the room just to reappear moments later with a trash can in hand. The bell on the door jangled for him again when he stepped outside.

Nothing felt as unnatural as an empty bar: all those seats vacant, mourning, matching only in their age and the quality of their wear, the edge of the counter a lustrous seam of wood polished to gleaming by human contact, all lacquer long gone. Prompto fidgeted in the room, smelling the trace of tobacco and bodies indelible in the air like a haunting, palpable at the back of his throat. A ceiling fan slowly stirred the silence, all time stopped in a liminal static, stretching endlessly in wait for the next evening when the neon would flick on again and more bodies would come to rub against the furniture and leave fresh rings of spilled drink on every surface. 

He was shaken from his pondering by the stranger coming back inside. He locked the door behind him with a definitive clack of the latch, fixing eyes on Prompto and not shifting them off while he crossed the room and lifted the bar flap to let himself behind, twisting his head to keep eye contact, finally breaking away when he turned his back to wash his hands. He was methodological and thorough, almost affectedly unhurried as though trying to transmit ease through example. It was working a little. At a loss for any alternative, Prompto sat at the bar, slumping elbow—wide onto its fresh—wiped surface. 

The stranger came back to him turning a cloth between his hands to dry them, then tucking it into his waistband at his side. It trailed him along the bar where he turned a glass from upside down to right way up, chinking a few cubes of ice into the bottom of it, then filling it with water. He set it down in front of Prompto.

“Thank you, uh…” Prompto faltered.

“Nyx,” the stranger said. A stranger still, by all accounts, but a name helped. “You’re running from someone?”

“...Yeah.” Prompto turned the glass in his hands while beads of condensation drew together, running in rivulets down its side. 

Nyx travelled the bar for another two glasses, short tumblers with a heavy base that he filled with liquid amber from a bottle on the back wall. Then he set one down in front of Prompto, and one in front of the stool beside, and came around the bar to join it. 

“No rush,” he said. “Talk when you’re ready.” He took a sip. His invitation was also  _ not _ one, in its assumption Prompto would eventually explain. 

Prompto huffed a laugh and shook his head. “You won’t believe it.”

“Let’s find out,” Nyx said, and he turned on his stool to give Prompto the full weight of his attention.

“ _ I _ don’t believe it.”

“Maybe try the drink then.”

Prompto smiled despite himself, let the pause drag comfortably between them, indulging a glance to the blinded window and the multiple slivers of alley beyond. He sighed.

“I was being chased by—” and he stopped, and decided drink was a good idea after all; felt its vapours reach his nose before the liquid touched his lips. It was a smoulder on his tongue and flames down his throat and a warm pool of comfort in his belly. He felt it seep through his body — a slow infiltration — and despite himself, he found some calm. Artificial or not, he’d take it. “I was being chased by myself,” he whispered, and he didn’t look at Nyx. Couldn’t. Knew how stupid this would sound.

But Nyx didn’t bat an eyelid. Didn’t flinch. Just sat there, expressionless, and said “...Go on.”

Prompto had been home.  _ Home. _ It made this all the worse. 

He’d stayed up too late for the grocery store and needed dinner — a predicament that recurred often enough to be habit — so he’d slipped into his shoes and pulled his jacket on and stepped into the night without thinking. He’d done it so many times before; he knew these corners, these buildings — all of it — so well he could tune it out, lost in his thoughts but never in his neighbourhood, just an automatic boy. Only tonight he’d looked twice at a reflection that wasn’t there... and couldn’t have been. The hair on his neck had prickled and a shiver gripped his spine; he picked up his pace. When he stopped outside the takeaway store, his footsteps somehow  _ didn’t, _ and he realised he wasn’t alone on the pavement. Someone had been following behind, matching him step by step. Nothing too serious, he’d thought; nobody owns the streets. But he spared a glance, and his veins filled with ice…

“Then I ran,” Prompto said, and he finally looked at Nyx, a plea for believing written clear on his face. “He looked—” and he let go a high—pitched nervous laugh— “He looked  _ just like me. _ ”

Nyx finally raised an eyebrow with his glass and downed the last of his drink. For a single heavy minute he gave no response. “Quite a little story,” he finally said. 

Prompto turned away, pained. 

“That doesn’t mean I don’t believe you, kid.”

“Prompto.” 

“Hmm?”

“My name.”

“Okay, Prompto, it’s quite a story... But you’re currently in a bar in the darkest part of Insomnia, where there are panes of glass the sun never hits in any real or metaphorical sense... and plenty of people I could say just the same for… I’ve seen a lot of shit that doesn’t make sense and done a bit of it myself... and I’ve heard a lot of stories—” He leaned forward ominously on his stool to capture all of Prompto’s attention. Fixed him to the spot with his blue eyes— “and I’ve met plenty of liars, and I can tell just by looking, you’re not one.”

**Author's Note:**

> The tag I desperately wanted to add, but couldn't: _Hints of a Clone_
> 
> I _do_ know how this story plays out, so while I don't plan on writing more, I can answer questions if you're curious or need closure :)


End file.
